The present invention relates generally to data communications. More particularly, the present invention relates to data transmission using address encoding.
In data communication systems that transfer frames of data between switching elements, whether inside a single system, or between independent systems, it is often desirable to include with the frames some meta-information describing the frames. This allows the sender and receiver to coordinate activities and handling of the relevant frames. Due to the requirement of wire-speed processing, and because handling is necessarily frame-by-frame, it follows that the meta-information should be sent at the same rate as the frames, and preferably attached to the frames.
However, the Ethernet frame format, as defined by the IEEE standard 802.3, does not leave any room to attach meta-information to the frames. One possible approach is to add the meta-information to the frame. However, this is not possible when the frame is already at the maximum allowable length. In addition, any change in frame-content semantics should not violate the Ethernet standard in any way.